A poem by EE Cummings, read by Zachariah Wells


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Artist/Composer: E. E. Cummings
Keywords: War poetry; Cummings; Olaf; Zachariah Wells

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

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Reviewer: peterotoolio - - October 22, 2009
Subject: I sing of Zach Wells, Bad, and Ig(norant)
This is a terrible reading of this poem. The reader does not know how to read poetry, of this or any other type. I have checked his other readings. They are equally flat, and boring.

This poem is dramatic, requiring some feeling in the performance. There is none in this reading. All of ee cummings' poetry requires some drama, that is to say, some feeling in the tone. They are not 'pure' word poems, but poems whose meaning depends on the relationship of the words to one another, and the sentences, also one to another.

In other words, they are like prosody, but with the addition of poetic techniques,such as rhyme and rhythm, which emphasize the meaning. If he read it as if it meant something, he might do better.

Poetic techniques are meant to add something to the meaning of the statements about the subject, not remove it. This is the usual kind of reading given by people who know nothing about how to read poetry. They imagine that, because the poem is broken up into lines, that the lines dictate the meaning. This is almost never true.

(To see what I mean, read one of Shakespear's sonnets, first, line by line, and then, as if it were prose. The line breaks and punctuation ought to compliment each other, not displace each other.) Since this is a sonnet, it needs to be read aloud as if it were (almost) prose. Only then, will it have its proper meaning.